Global Positioning

Windows Phone, Silverlight and Rich Text Fields

2012-01-29T14:48:00.004+01:00

I'm currently working with a mobile dating application, named as Hooxter. You should follow it on twitter @hooxter just in case You are interested how it develops, but now to the actual topic.

The mobile application has one screen where I need to display formatted text, basically it's a chat windows where the conversation is rolling and each post is displayed as own chapter together with the information who sent that post.

In QT this was pretty straight forward, since I can just use QTextBrowser to display it, but the story was different in Windows Phone application and specially when You use MVVM pattern.

If You have such problem, just combine the information from following three posts and You have the same functionality in WP.

First, take RichTextBox to use by using instructions in here.

Secondly You need to the content as bindable, simple solution from here.

Then last but not least, define the custom namespace by using the instructions from here.

Please also note that You need to add namespace for the new content You add to the model, check notes for that from this post

Elisa Viihde and iPad remote control

2011-07-11T16:04:00.006+02:00

I recently bought a new house and finally I had some extra space in basement to locate my servers in a fancy rack.
When renovating the house, I decided that I'm not going to put any coaxial cable for TV antennas to any room excluding the server room. Anyhow, all rooms has now cat6 wiring, totally 48 plugs all over the house.

So now when everything is "ready", all my TV's are using Ethernet to get "the signal". The solution is pretty standard one, I have one HP Proliant acting as a HTPC which has several DVB-T USB dongles connected to the TV-antenna. Each TV has XBOX-360 connected to them and that's working as a media extender for the HTPC Media Center, so now I can use the XBOX to see movies, pictures, gaming and watching live TV.

Last Christmas I subscribed Elisa Viihde for 24 for months. Elisa Viihde is an IPTV service offered by the largest Telco in Finland called as Elisa. The box has one issue, the "basic" channels are received via the terrestrial TV network.
So now when I did not have any of such wiring in my house, I had a small issue since I could not connect the Elisa Viihde box directly in to my TV. Or I could, but I could then watch only the "pay-TV" and I would need to switch back to XBOX when I want to see the "regular channels".

I did mount one HDMI cable to the wall when fixing the walls. The cable goes directly to the basement from my living room wall, the same applies to all speaker wires...

The final solution was to locate the Elisa Viihde box to the basement and connect that via HDMI cable to the TV. Ok, all works excluding the remote controller. To solve that issue, I bough and device called as USB-UIRT from http://www.usbuirt.com/ it took a week to arrive my local post office and after that, I just needed to figure out that how to use it.

I installed IIS server with PHP and the USB-UIRT to my HTPC. Then one extra application called as UUTX which I found from here http://www.etcwiki.org/wiki/Uutx.exe_command_line_for_usb-uirt. And later I just recorded the commands from Elisa Viihde remote controller and stored them in one file.
I tested the commands with the uutx.exe and all were working fine. So next step was to write extremely simple PHP script which converts the commands to buttons and displays them on a web-page.

Now I can connect to that web-page by using iPad and manage the Elisa Viihde from my living room...

Btw. the Elisa Viihde is connected also to the amplifier I have on my server room, so now there is not too many visible devices in the living room excluding the flat-screen LG and the speakers.

The next step is to implement this code to use jQuery UI and Ajaxize the it, but since it's doing it's job and there is +28 celcius outside, I think to jump in to my convertible and ride to the beach...

Samsung SGH-i200 and CellID

2009-08-29T09:00:00.003+02:00

I have one on-going project where I need to use location data of mobile device to perform some actions. I have been doing some LBS related stuff earlier, based on GPS data from Nokia devices by using Java API, but now I need to target also to "low-end" devices which has no GPS capability. Ok, there's no trick, since all know that the cell-id can be used for such purpose and when comparing that to some back-end database holding a information for cellId/MNC/MCC geo-location mapping.

In the Symbian based devices, there's no issue, at least when using C++ API, Java API may have some limitations. So my Symbian (3rd edition) client is working just fine.

Then it was time to create same application for Windows Mobile 6. During the development, I got my first touch to C# and Microsoft development tools. Well, I must say that I'm happily surprised about their tools. If You compare Carbide C++ for Symbian and Visual Studio 2008 for Windows Mobile, I need to say that the Windows world feels more user friendly.

Currently I have only one device with WM 6.0 and that is one of those low-end mobiles using WM, Samsung SGH-i200. I bought that as a new from Finland and the price was 98 euros, not bad... Anyhow, the user interface of the device doesn't look fancy at all, the home-page/desktop or how do You call it in Windows looks ok, but rest is from the eighties... So if some one is complaining that Nokia has weak user experience, I really need to say that the WM is even worst. And now I'm comparing low-end versions, like S40 of Nokia and WM 6 standard.

So, to the problem. The RIL interface seems to be nicely documented by Microsoft, so it didn't take many minutes to write the skeleton out for testing. What I have learn from Mobile Development is that it's usually more efficient to write a simple skeleton to test that all API's You need are working and then start building the real application. You can never trust that the API's are working as documented.

And exactly that happened in here. I get the CellID, MNC and MCC out, but since I know very well the ones available in my home-office, I noticed immediately that those are not even near to the correct ones. I know that in some WM devices those are working fine, I did Googling and got the proof :) The MNC and MCC are constant, but the CellId changes sometimes. I'm pretty sure that the engineers in Samsung hasn't implement this feature and that they are just returning some rubbish values for me to avoid writing some extra line of code to return that the API is not available.

I hopefully get HTC with WM 6 Professional during next week, so let's see how that performs.

jQuery remove for HTML select options

2009-08-28T12:04:00.003+02:00

Today, I faced yet another issue with jQuery :)

I'm building a product configurator where each select event effects to other fields, filling in parameters compatible with the field where the selection was made. For selectors, I'm using HTML select field.

So what my plan was. I was planning to query the data from the server via regular getJSON method and then based on the result, populate required fields in the configurator. First thing was to clean all existing fields from old data, before populating them with a new data. For cleaning I was using the standard remove method provided by the jQuery.

To fill in the fields, I'm using Sam Collett's tool to manage data on selects. I'm using it in many places so it was a natural choose for htis as well. Anyhow, when stress-testing the configurator, I noticed that sometimes there's empty options on select, which were not cleaned properly by the jQuery remove ? I tried also just to insert empty html and jQuery empty method, but no success. When I removed the code which populated the fields, the select was empty...

Then I finally decided to make tests with the removeOption from the Sam's library and voila, works like a charm.

So if You ever face similar problems, I recommend You to try out Sam's library.


  function someproductRePopulateFields(data, status, message)
  {
      var elementList =  $("#"+data.method);
     
      elementList.removeOption(/./);
     
      if (data.statusMessage)
        { 
          updateStatusMessage(data.statusMessage);
        }
      else
        {
          updateStatusMessage("");
          var selectOptions = $("#"+data.method);
          selectOptions.addOption(data.elements);
        }
  }

jQuery callbacks on HTML load

2009-08-17T14:07:00.004+02:00

In my current project, I needed to start using jQuery as a library for user interface components.
The project uses AJAX quite heavily so I have spent some time thinking how to do the things
efficiently since the customer has pretty great requirements from performance.

There's a couple of places where the system loads content to a DIV and then some Javascript
function needs to be called to perform some action after the document is loaded. Action could be like initializing Google map.

Since jQuery doesn't support live events for "ready" type of events, I need to find some other method to initialize the map.
One could be onload event on body, but since this is a framework and div's are updated on fly based on the application loaded, it's out of the question.
Another manner would be to use $(document).ready inline in the HTML code loaded to DIV, but from my opinion it's not elegant style either, at least based on MVC.

Since request expecting response as HTML is not capable to deliver Javascript call-backs, I decided to do one simple trick.

I added one extra header to response, let's call it as X-onLoadCallBack.
Then when the callback of successful transaction is called by jQuery after the HTML is loaded,
the call-back will check if the mentioned header is found and executes it by using eval.

Later I faced another issue, since I needed two callbacks to be called on-load. One for the framework and another for the plugin in the framework.
Solution is to add two call-backs with same header name.
I noticed that based on http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-XMLHttpRequest-20060405/#dfn-getallresponseheader they are separated with comma, so
I added a check to verify if there's multiple callbacks and then loop them through and execute eval one-by-one.



// function triggered on page load
function somefunction()
{
 $.getJSON("index.php", {element: element, objectId: id}, checkResults);
}

function checkResults()
{
   // Other code in here....
   $(document).ready(function(){
           $("#mainarea").load("index.php", {element:'run_plugin'}, checkCallBacks)
   });

}

function checkCallBacks(responseText, textStatus, XMLHttpRequest)
{
   pluginCallBackFunction = XMLHttpRequest.getResponseHeader('X-onLoadCallBack');

   if (pluginCallBackFunction.match(","))
     {
       var cBPluginArray = pluginCallBackFunction.split(", ");
       $.each(cBPluginArray, function(key, val){eval(val+"();");})   
     }
   else if (pluginCallBackFunction)
     {
       eval(pluginCallBackFunction+"();");
     }
}

Note that when sending headers from PHP, You must define "replace" flag to false and it allows multiple headers with same name.

Nokia E51 and Asterisk

2008-05-19T17:45:00.002+02:00

I got Nokia E51 and decided to do some testing with that against Asterisk PBX.

Everything was working fine until the phone was not able to receive any calls, it freezed completely and only way to get it back online was hard reboot.

I tried to Google, no results, I reflashed it, no results, tried all different settings combinations on handset, no results.

I started to go through the Asterisk confs from scratch and finally found the error. I had switched the "videosupport" parameter in sip.conf to yes and when I switched that back off, everything started to work again...

Anyway, it seems to work nicely now so I'm going to do some field testing with it.

Windows Vista and Slow Keyboard Response

2008-01-18T13:42:00.000+01:00

Long time no entries, but finally I got so pissed up that I need to write one :)

I got Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop some months ago. The PC had factory installed Vista Business, so I was a little bit of worry how stable it is, but seems to work ok.

I started to install applications I used on my old XP PC. Everything went well and all got installed, excluding Stonegate VPN client which didn't have support for Vista.
I decided to replace that with OpenVPN since I'm not happy to Stonegate VPN client stability, not even in my old XP where it caused issues with the network every now and then.
I use the PC suite for syncing my mobile with PC, in XP I had Outlook, but in Vista I decided to use Windows Contacts which replaced the Windows Address Book from earlier Windows versions.

After initial sync, the PC started to act weirdly, when typing text output to screen got jammed, frozen what ever you want to call it, but letters appeared sometimes with three to five second delay.
This happened in all programs and it was very annoying when trying to write some document, email etc.

I tried to google, but no fix found. So I decided to remove PC suite which was the last program installed. No effect.
I continued to remove applications one-by-one, no effect.
I decided to re-install Vista since I was sure that I have somekind of virus in my PC which were not detected by antivirus software.

After re-installation Vista, everything started to work fine. I started re-install applications one by one, testing if the same issue appears again. Didn't happen. This time I didn't spend time with syncing my phone.

That all happened on last octobre and until today everything has been working fine.

Today I got new mobile and I decided to sync the contacts through the PC from old E50 to new Nokia 6110 Navigator. First I noticed that the PC Suite didn't support Windows contacts, so I needed to upgrade it to the latest one. After syncing the contacts from E50 to PC, the same issue happened again. Text started to flos slowly to the screen.

Ok, now I was sure that it was the PC suite since that's the only software I have installed today. I decided to make one test before removing the PC Suite, since it didn't help on last time. I removed all contacts from my Windows Contacts after syncing them to my 6110.

What happened, the issue was solved, text was flowing nicely and smoothly. I tested it again by syncing the contacts to the Windows Contacts from the mobile phone and I had same issue again. So remove the contacts again - no issues...

As a conclusion. If You have several contacts in Your Windows Contacts - it will generate typing problems in all applications.

My new personal trainer

2007-03-03T17:02:00.000+01:00

When I was racing in Finlandia MTB 2006 I noticed some guys with FRWD device in the arm. I decided to buy one of those for me on my Christmas holiday in Finland. What happened, the company went bankruptcy before my holidays. This is a good example of Finnish high-tech company, they may have the best product on the market, but the sales doesn't work. I sent an email to the company asking if they would still have some devices on stock but didn't got any answers.

I had a business trip to Finland again on january and what happened, I got an email from the managing director of the FRWD that the company has been bought by Elisa Corporation. He told me two places in greater Helsinki area who had the devices in stock, so there was noting else to do than go and buy it.

There is totally four different models available, I wanted to buy the one with Nokia Series 60 compatibility since I didn't have real need for the wrist device. I wanted to get just the logger and use my Nokia 5500 as a monitor. Anyway, they had only the best model available W600 so I needed to buy that. I was in believe that I could just drop the wrist device and use it with the 5500, but the communication protocol is not bluetooth, so it doesn't work with my 5500.

Anyway, it's pretty cool gadget. It tracks all my route coordinates by using GPS including altitude, heart-rate, speed, temperature. Later I can re-play the practice on my PC with the program included to the packet. Now I can also see the speed, distance and heart-rate on real-time when I'm biking or hiking. No need to use external speed meters in by bike.

It has also support for Google Earth, so I can import my routes to GE and save them as an image and share it with my friends... There also feature that I can race against my earlier performances by using the same route and comparing them on the re-player.

Joomla and Missing Articles

2006-12-23T10:28:00.000+01:00

Yestarday I was fighting with Joomla CMS since I needed to move website from server to another which had different version of MySQL. The old was running with version 3.23 and the new one on version 4.0.

There's some differences in field definitions so the mysqldump didn't loaded correctly to the new database. I got it working as easy as copying the database files from the old to the new server and all were working just fine, or was it...

Everything was working just fine in the website, but the article listing gave error "There are no items to display". I was sure that it had something to do with the database "import" since I had excatly same version of Joomla installed on the new server as I had in the old one. Finally I noticed that the new server was running on past and after setting the date to correct all worked well.

New Fon Access Point

2006-12-16T23:53:00.000+01:00

I received yesterday the new Fon access point which was bundled to same deal with the SMC WiFi Skype phone. This new version of Fon access points is working perfectly with the phone, so good that I didn't returned it as I was planning.

The new access point seems to be much more well designed than the old Linksys switch / access point. For example this includes two different wireless lans, one which is for the Fon and it's using their authentication. Another is using WPA so I can now use only one physical device since before I needed to have two, one to provide the Fon connection and another with WPA for my own laptops.

Also the configuration is now done in their website and the device is retrieving the configuration changes and upgrades from Fon servers every 24 hours or in every restart.

I will take keep the new access point at home and I'm going to install the old one to our office to offer wider Fon coverage...

Skype and FON

2006-12-12T16:25:00.000+01:00

I finally managed to solve my internet problems and I have again connection at home.

My neighbor was providing Fon connection but suddely it died or went offline so I decided to make again contract with some real ISP.
The problem was that the Wanadoo was still holding my line, (after almost half year when I cancelled the subscription) and there was no way to connect any other provider.
I tried that with Ya.com, result was that I needed to pay the connection even if I didn't have it, so I paid the penalty 160 euros to cancel the connection with ya.com.
The adventure with ya.com was worth of a little more than 300 euros, so I decided that I will never ever contract anything from them, neither from Wanadoo - now called as Orange in here.

Like I told earlier in my blog, I cancelled also the Telefonica line since they were charging me all the time and I didn't have any use for the line...
When I was in Bolivia, I noticed that Telefonica had an offer "no setup fee for new lines", I decided to contract a new one - new number - no problems.
I took the ADSL also from Telefonica, it's much more expensive than any other, but at least I have now single point to make reclamations.

Three weeks ago I received promotion from Fon where they were marketing Skype compatible phone with the pharse "The Whole World can Talk for Free".
Since I have again the internet, I bought the device since Lucy needs some way to commincate back to home and the calls by using Skype are reasonable prized.
I received the phone, but what a surprise, it can't connect to Fon router since the Fon is using ChilliSpot authentication and authorizaton system which is based on HTTP.
The phone has no web-browser, neither anykind of client which could process the AA against the Fon router.
I wrote to the Skype support an email and their answer was, it's not supported and that I can return the device if I want. What the hell would I do with the device which doesn't work, so I told them that I'm going to return it. Let's see how it goes.

Btw, I also received some weeks a go a letter from Spanair about my reclamation. They promised a one free flight in Spain as a replacement for the business class european ticket where I needed to fly in low-cost airline... I'm not really agree with them.

Death Road

2006-10-08T02:57:00.000+02:00

The Most Dangerous Road is located here in Bolivia. It's small road and at the moment only connection from La Paz via Corioco to Brazil. The goverment has been constructing a new road, but at the time it's snot ready yet. The death toll is around 250 persons in that 40 kilometer strip.

Here in La Paz are several companies of which are arranging day-trips including the bike, transport and food for the day. I checked two, Downhill Madness and Gravity, both located in same building on downtown.

I choosed the Gravity based on the positive stories found from internet and they also had similar Kona as I have now at home. Gravity was a bit more expensive than the DH Madness, but not much. The trip needs to booked at least one day advance, so i booked my trip on saturday.

On sunday morning we left from near of their office by bus to the mountains, climbed up to +4000 meters where was the time to get biked down from the bus and put biking gears on.
They offer basically everything, but I had my own stuff with me so I used mainly those.

When booking the trip, I got understanding that it's serious driving and guides are real professional bikers, there was DH racing videos playing in the office etc..

The biggets surprise was that 90% people participating to the trip hasn't touch bike since teen years. So in this point I realized that it was regular tourist day trip, not real mountain biking trip as advertised.
The chief guide, Gooey started to keep lessons how to drive with a bike etc...
Worst surprise was that they hade removed the biggest chain-wheels from the front, so there was not even theorical possibility to get speed with those bikes.
The full-suspension was totally not needed in this track and for me it looked just like a marketing trick to get money out from stupid tourists.
They also marketed that all bikes are fine tuned perfectly, like their own bikes. I don't know how those guys adjust the bikes but I needed to re-adjust the gears totally.

Ok, we started to drive the road, first 20 kilometers was mainly down-hill on asfalt continuing with 5 kilometers uphill. The funniest part was that almost have of the participants used bus for that instead of biking it.

After that we had small brake where they offered some chocolate bars and banana. This was the point where the Death Road started... Gooey kept short briefing about how to ride since there was left side traffic on use, so vehicles going down uses the outer side of the road.

The road was more or less what I expected, muddy road with out any protection to drop down from the edge. There was more or less 100 meters direct drop right after the road, so I really wanted to drop... Mianly the road was dry, but there was some slipery parts and my bikes rear tyre was almost finnish, so needed to take carafully those corners.

There was lot's of truck on that road and they are really using it for ground transport. I don't understand who they have "only" 250 deads in there...

I was mainly driving with the first guy, there was another group behind us including three guys but rest were coming down more or less slow. Two girls was sitting in the bus for whole road.

It took more or less 4 hours to get down since we had several stops during the road, including one longer where they offered some sandwitches and softdrinks.

At the down we were supposed to have launch in the hotel including several hours in the pool. That was they were saying still on saturday when they sold the trip, but what happened, there was a luch in some backyard full of fiting dogs and monkeys. No pool. And the food wasn't anything special.
Funniest thing is that they are giving a way a brochure about the Bolivia were they told than it's not good to eat from the kiosks from the streets since the hygienia is not good, for me this "restaurant" looked more or less like those kiosks in the La Paz streets.

On the brochure, there was also note about free beer as soon as we get down to the Coroico, sure there was, two classes and later they charged five start restaurant price after You had drinked it.

Last but not least, they were selling CD including "high-rez" images from the road. I bought the CD with 5 dollars, and it sure wasn't worth it.

The views were awesome and the DH was fun, but the service was regular "tourist class", nothing special.

Debian on Dell Power Edge 1950

2006-10-01T02:42:00.000+02:00

The new Dell Power Edge is a bit tricky to get working with the Debian due it's SAS disks.

First step is to get the latest etch installation image, I was using this.

- Start the installation as usually
- Go through all menus and set values corresponding to Your environment.
- Partition the disk as You want
- Configure network
- Install the base system
- Configure the APT
- Finnish the installation normally

Now comes the "special part"
- Boot again with the installation disk
- Continue the installation until it asks about the partitioning stuff
- Click back twice to return installation menu
- Open console with "ctrl + alt + f2"
- Make new dir "mkdir /target"
- Mount it "mount /dev/sda1 /target"
- If all are not in one partition, mount the sys to the target "mount /sys /target/sys"
- Chroot to the target "chroot /target"
- Mount needed folders, at least "mount proc" and I had var on own, so "mount /var"
- Make sure that You have network connectivity and /etc/apt/source.list with correct peers
- Update the package list "apt-get update"
- Since we have very base system installed, you need to get some more packages, run "apt-get install yaird initrd-tools sudo ssh"
- Good time to update the kernel to the latest, I used linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem_2.6.18-1_i386.deb
- Install the new kernel "dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem_2.6.18-1_i386.deb"
- Change to your boot directory "cd /boot"
- The installation created an initrd.img- 2.6.18-1-686-bigmem, I deleted it before running YAIRD to avoid conflicts
- Run "yaird --output initrd.img-linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem 2.6.18-1-686-bigmem"
-Add to /etc/kernel-img.conf following items:
ramdisk = /usr/sbin/mkinitrd.yaird
- Add to /etc/mkinitrd/modules following modules:
scsi_mod
mptbase
mptsas
mptscsih
sd_mod
Add to /etc/modules following items:
ide-cd
ide-disk
ide-generic
mptbase
mptscsih
mptsas

Reboot and You should have working Power Edge with Linux !

Airlines

2006-09-29T19:49:00.000+02:00

If Spanair sucks, I can't say same of Iberia.

I had my flight to Sao Paulo on last tuesday and I got again upgrade to business class, and if you know what is flying 10 hours, You really know how to appreciate it.
I have got upgrade from Iberia basically for every second trans-atlantic fligh I have made with it and that's something I call as a service.

I don't even have Iberia gold card, I'm using my American Airlines card since that gives best value for my miles.
With AA card, I get free european flight with 20 000 miles, with Finnair card I would need 30 000 miles for that and more or less same with Iberia when comparing their points to miles.

This was also first time when I was able to test the seat which goes totally vertical position and that really is sweet :)

I had a connection from Sao Paulo to La Paz with LAB, hmm... That's maybe the worst airline I have ever used.
I need to use that when getting out from here, but that's definetely last time I'm going to use it.
The airplanes are old I mean very old Boeing 727-200 models and as soon as You get in, You start feeling bad.
The seats were broken and some of them were re-painted not so well. People were using mobiles during the flight, on take-off and landing people had seats in rest-position.
I needed to change plane in the Santa Cruz, but what a surprise the airplane was the same I was using to get there from Sao Paulo.
The ramp guys had a huge hurry to get cargo loaded and there was several dangerous situations during the load.

Finlandia MTB 2006

2006-09-25T18:20:00.000+02:00

I just arrived from Finland where I was participating to Finlandia MTB competition.

Everything went fine when facing the facts that what was my physical condition on april :)

I believe that there was aprx. 200 racers in my serie (F1), since I got number 178 fro the registration and there was still few guys after me in a line. In results I was 115th , not very special position but when comparing to hardnes of the race, I'm more than saticfied. The race was 70 kilometers, mainly in the forest and 90% of it was up-hill down-hill combination, rest flat ground. 140 arrived to the final and all competitors from other series was already lost the game before the start since they didn't have balls to go to the full lenght race ;)

I flow to Finland almost directly from middle-east, so I had been sitting like 15 hours in the airplane before competion and I'm pretty sure that next year I will go to Finland a little bit earlier to leave some period for relaxing and warming up. Target in next year is to be in top 50.

I also bought a new bike and I actually got it night before the race so it was also new for me, but it's perfect, totally different experience than with hard-tail bikes I have used before.

I will continue today to Bolivia for three weeks, last time when I was there I saw some company which was renting Trek bikes, so I definetely need to rent one of them and test the Bolivia trails...

Dell Inspiron 640m

2006-09-16T00:41:00.000+02:00

I bought a new Dell Inspiron 640m laptop to home for Lucy two weeks ago. They promised that it will arrive on 18th of september, but as a surprise it arrived ten days earlier...

The device is excellent, nice bright wide-screen, bluetooth, integrated memory-card reader etc...

I just don't like the Dell way to pre-install tens of programs as default with trial licenses. I understand try-and-buy method, but only when I do it voluntary, not in the way that i'm forced to uninstall tens of programs from my new PC which is slow as a hell die those pre-loaded apps.

I was using it one week before I lost my nervs with the bad wifi link, my work PC had good stable connection from my neighbour's wifi, but the new machine was re-connecting every 30 seconds or so. Today I removed the Intel's wifi manager and started to use Windows XP default WiFi manager and problems stopped right-away.

The bastard who was providing FON connection to me seems to removed the router and due the fact that I lost my nervs and cancelled all internet contracts, I'm now using my neighbour's open internet :(

Plazes and Fon

2006-08-19T22:53:00.000+02:00

Long time without blogging...

Today I decided to spend some time by testing the Plazes service which is actually pretty cool.

The basic idea of Plazes is that everytime when I log in to the network from my PC or Cellphone the application updates my current location to it's database.
If the place is not yet recognized, the Plazer will prompt some basic details from me about the location and registers it to the Plaze database for the future users.

I have integrated Plazes with my skype account, so everytime when I'm online, my Skype contacts can see where am I. My blog has also a module which is showing the same data.

Plazes also keeps track of places I have been and through it's Flickr interface, I can insert geodata to my images stored in the Flicker service.

I installed the Plazer in to my PC and in to my Nokia N70 mobile terminal.
The PC client still seems to be in a beta phase, but without any major bugs.
The mobile version seems to be pretty nice also, but one thing which is missing from that is the "current location" handling.
Looks like that it can't handle the information provided by the mobile network to keep track of "where am I" since the it doesn't automatically find any Plazes near me. Only way it could know where am I is the Cell ID provided the network.
The issue can be of course in the used mobile network (Telefonica) and I asked more info from the Plazes guys to help me to verify where the problem is.
The problem is pretty severe since the users don't want to tell for the client where they are and update that info all the time.

I decided to cancel all my internet contracts since the ya.com is still down due the fact that the Wanadoo is reserving my line from Telefonica.
Ya.com is still billing even I haven't use that service after the first week.
Telefonica is needed because in this third-world country ADSL can't be connected if the house doesn't have telephone contract with local operator. So basically this means that two spanish companies will loose a customer and I save 70 euros per month. I have been paying the services without service now almost five months.

I installed an Fon wifi router in to our office and joined to the Fon network as a linus member. Basically this means that if now when I'm providing the internet for free in our office region - I can use internet for free in any spot where the Fon coverage is available and lucky me, I have it in my home (actually i have two wifi networks available from my home), so bye bye Telefonica and other local operators...

Xfera and TeliaSonera

2006-07-06T10:26:00.000+02:00

I have been following the news related to TeliaSonera Xfera businesses here in Spain. All I can say is that the guys in TeliaSonera seems to be very much on wrong track.

In Spain, here is now three operators and all of them are huge when comparing to TeliaSonera. Number one is naturally the Telefonica who bought BellSouth operations two-three years ago and later O2 from UK and another countries so they have operations basically in all countries in Latin-america and several countries in Europe.
Number two here is Vodafone, I think everybody knows what kind of giant it is all over the world even if it's making huge negative results.
Third one is ex. / still Amena bought by Orange. Orange will change Amena's name here to Orange during this year and also merge the business from the one of the biggest internet operators Wanadoo to under same name. Both companies owned by France Telecom.

Mobile user penetration here already is like 100% which is rather high. What is Xfera's catch to get the clients ?
Xfera has been established in year 2000 by Sonera and Vivendi and ACS spanish construction company.
That meens that they have had their company up now six years and the 3g network almost same time without any customers. I saw the guys two years ago in their office in Alcobendas. Small office, aprx. 30 guys working in there. They told me clearly that their target market is youngsters and they are going to hit that market with free 3g phones as soon as there will be reasonable portfolio available.
Very nice target market for new operator with own network... Usually poor user doesn't consume a huge amounts of money to phone calls / data services either, since they are always looking the cheapest solution...

So what if they have changed the plan and are targetting now to the corporate sector ?
Sure, Telefonica has excellent roaming coverage especially in latin-america. Vodafone has same tarif in use in all it's regions which are mainly in Europe. I'm pretty sure that TeliaSonera doesn't have same negotiation power for getting same kind of agreements than those two.

What's left ? Tourists and retired who has second house in next from the beach of course. There is huge population of german, british tourists in Costa del Sol.
True, but for example in UK, Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica has networks in there and usually that means that the roaming calls are cheaper between the same network in different countries. Yes, there is some scandinavian tourists as well, but is there sence to build network for 100 000 users ?

If I would be CEO of the Xfera, I would open the network for MVNO's and start offering services throught them, but when I was there in meeting with Xfera guys, he told directly that they have paid the license and the network so no other company won't get benefits from that... Weird attitude...

RoadTrip

2006-07-05T22:24:00.000+02:00

My friends from Finland decied to come to visit in Spain, or actually they are going from Finland to Gibraltar.... That's not very unusual trip, there is several finnish who are driving that by car once in a year. Check what thease guys are using :)

Btw, Wanadoo still haven't released my line, it has been now more than three months from day when i cancelled the service with them. Neither Spanair hasn't responsed to my reclamation - good example of customer rights in Spain.

But everything is not so good in Finland either. I was selling my 21m2 flat in Lauttasaari, Helsinki. I asked two real estate brokers to evaluate price for the flat. First one gave me 78 000 and another 95 000 EUR. There is a slight difference. So Kiinteistomaailma who gave the bigger evaluation got the deal and sold the house with the price he promised to get from it. Takio, which is the another company should change their business since their professional skills seems to be from ass. I highly suggest You to avoid Takio's "services".

This is second week at work after my holidays in Finland. The holidays were a little work oriented since my father has a huge construction project in our summer house. Practically I spent whole my holiday in there trying to help the guys.

Normally when I go to the Finland, I get some "extra" kilos, but this time I avoided them easily - even lost some. This morning the weight was 92.9, so 12 kilos less than when started at the beginning of may. I checked also my Vo2Max value, it was 2nd of may 33 now it's 38 but still way to go to my target which is 60.

Spanair service

2006-06-27T19:43:00.000+02:00

I was going to Finland on my holiday and booked flight MAD-HEL-MAD on 31.5.2006 from Spanair's telephone service by using my miles.

The girl on the phone forgot to mention that I need to pickup the tickets and pay the taxes before the day I'm going to fly.
My luck was that I booked tickets to my wife later and this time the officer told that I need to go to the Spanair office and pay the taxes and get the tickets...
Without this booking I would have loosed my own tickets because I didn't know about to get the tickets advanced from the Spanair office.

I had a flight at 10.6.2006 from Madrid to Helsinki via Barcelona. The flight from Madrid left around 1.5 hour late and I lost my connection to Helsinki. There I was waiting one hour to get my luggages from the belt in Barcelona. During that I met some other finnish at the airport, they had same flight as me and same problems as well in Barcelona.

Later I went to make a claim to Spanairs desk, I got a tickets to AirBerlin for next day (sunday),I asked several times that is that a business class ticket since based on my knowledge the AirBerlin is a low cost airline without Business Class, she always told me that yes, it's in business class. Later She put me to wait hotel bus for two hours !!! It was 11 when I got to the hotel after several hours in a airport so there was no dinner anymore in hotel because it was too late.

They claimed that the hotel is four star hotel, but I have been never ever in my life in so small hotel room.

Sunday morning I got back to the airport and when I was checking in to AirBerlin flight, the girl told me that there is no Business Class in their planes. I made an reclamation to Newco / Spanair officer, she told me that I don't have business class ticket and that my AirBerlin ticket is for coach class and they can't change it because I'm now AirBerlin customer.

Another Newco / Spanair officer told me that Spanair business is not real business and that in another airlines it's always coach with Spanair Business Class tickets.
I didn't have time to argue since she was very rude and I needed to board to the plane.

Anyway, when I was checking in yesterday in Helsinki, the ticket was full business class ticket for Lufthansa, so why they didn't put me to Lufthansa in Barcelona instead of AirBerlin.

When I got back to the Spain yesterday, my luggages were lost...

I wrote an claim to Spanair, so let's wait if they get back to business which would be very unusual here in Spain.

Pretty much problems for one trip... And put's me thinking can I use Spanair services second time since this was a first time.

Problems with Internet connection providers in Spain.

2006-06-06T13:11:00.000+02:00

I was a customer of Wanadoo, Spain until Ya.com called me (8.3.2006) and offered better price and faster bandwidth for me.

I told for the sales woman (Lucia Fernandez, fax number: 916514042) that I can change to Ya.com and should I do something with my old operator to cancel the service or do they take care of it. She told me that they will take care of everything and the change is transparently for me and I just need to change the router when I lost the connectivity with Wanadoo. I trusted him. She promised that this all will happen in two weeks and it happened.

The ya.com internet was working three days before it went down. I tried again with Wanadoo and it was up again. I called several times to Ya.com support and they didn't know what is the problem. I called to Telefonica and asked who is reserving my line, they didn't told. I received an Email from Wanadoo that they have opened my connection and it's ready to use.
I called back to Wanadoo on 10.4.2006 and told that I don't want their connection, they told that there was error and they will cancel it and I got confirmation number they also told that it takes two weeks more to disconnect the line and release it for Ya.com

One month ago they finally disconnected the line from their end, but they didn't release line from Telefonica so Ya.com can't connect to my line and I'm still without internet.
I have been caling to Wanadoo on daily basis asking what is the situation with the release, it changes by everyday today it's all clear and tomorrow they can't say the date since they have technical problems in their systems. What kind of operator is running that kind systems that can't be fixed in three months ? And when I try to ask to talk with some supervisor, they tells that the support is the only person who can communicate with clients neither they don't want to tell where the office is so for me they look like a face-less ass-holes.

Both operators are charging me, Ya.com from very beginning. When I canceled the bill from my bank they started to send claims to me that I need to pay the bill. I paid it finally again because I don't want any problems with credit registry etc. since I know that they will never ever cancel the notice they will send to there and I need to fight rest of my life with that record.

So what I have learn, never ever subscribe ANY service from ANY Spanish company, they don't have ANY respect to rules or customers and when You tried to get support from them, or you need to solve some issue.

Microsoft sucks, once again

2006-06-05T19:04:00.000+02:00

I needed to install application to my laptop and run that as a service. I have been now fighting almost whole day to get Windows firewall working in my laptop.

The problem was that any rule I put to the accept list, it didn't allow any incoming connections to my PC.

Finally I found the problem, it's Windows updates which has broke the Winsock registry.

How to hell it can be leagal to sell this kind of shit ?

But hey, sporting results from last week 8 hours and 46 minutes and result 4931 calories burned :)

Weight in this morning was 97,8 so the direction is still correct :)

Extending WiFi

2006-05-30T15:53:00.000+02:00

I have been working last week to get solution for one of our prospect customers who has bought WiFi core network from one Finnish provider.

They are now facing problems whenthey have a need to extend their network to several remote sites.

Main problem has been of course money, since they are not willing to pay huge amounts of money to be able to build local wifi network in the each site.

So I needed to find solution for them. Basically my company has solution for several kinds of WiFi installations, but problem in this was that they don't support Wireless Distribution System (WDS) neither MESH style networking, so I needed to write an explanation for them how to get this issue solved.

I uploaded the document to our Wireless ZT website, you can check it from here if you are interested.

On same time I decided to put some basic info about our WiFi products on to the site, this is update was planned to do long time ago :)

Getting fit

2006-05-29T17:25:00.000+02:00

I have been planning to start my healt improvement now almost two years. When I moved to Spain from Finland, in first half year I got like 15 extra kilos, soon I decided to get rid of those plus some more. It's not so easy as it sounds :) I have been trying now two years with bad success.

December when I was in Brasil with my brother, he told me that he's going to participate to Berlin's marathon on september, well I got idea to participate as well, but now it seems like impossible target :)

Well, around three weeks ago, my weight was 105 kilos. I decided that now this is going to end and I will take training more seriously and when I visited in Finland I ought Polar F11 heart rate monitor from the airport.

It's very nice gadget, I didn't realized until I was at home and start reading the manual. I can transfer all my training data to Polar's web-service where my virtual personal trainer is located. All this transfer without any cables, infrared or bluetooth.

It's using technology called SonicLink, it's like good old modem sending signals to my PC's microphone and through that it transmits the data to my PC which forwards it to the Polar's web-service. Pretty cool :)

I would like to get that data from Polar's web-service to my own homepage, so I decided to contact Polar support and ask if they could do somekind of Flash application I can include to my web-site. This Flash would then fetch the data from Polar's system and show it in my web-site.

I took some traces with etherreal when my PC was connecting to Polar's web-service and the protocol seems to be pretty simple XML based protocol. If they are not going to do it - I will...

Results from last week were totally 8 hours 7 minutes of sport and 5379 calories spend :) Most of the training was made with mountain bike and there was only one running session. Weight this morning 99,6 kilos so we are going to correct direction.

SMS AC SPAM

2006-05-26T11:17:00.000+02:00

I have been participating to several trade shows and always I can find one company from there - SMS AC.

In CTIA 2006 they had huge stand and they were claiming that they are biggest "Mobile Community" like they have been always claiming. I and several friends of my are receiving constantly SPAM from them claiming that some friend of mine is inviting my to he's network.

The fact is that none of my friends are participating to their network, never had - never will.
Seems that they are getting the contacts from MSN messenger address book, since all invites comes from my messenger contacts and the SPAM arrives always to my MSN registered email addresses.

My question is - who is that stupid to invest this kind of SPAM company?
This SPAM is not just marketing some products like medicines etc. but including lies that my friends are inviting me to this service, so is this leagal ?

Orange Partner Camp

2006-05-22T11:42:00.000+02:00

I was participating to Orange Partner Camp 2006 in Sarasota, FL. The Partner Camp was arranged in famous Colony Tennis Resort and the place seemed to be very nice if You forget that it was middle of nothing. Actually it was easy to forget since Orange offered everything from good food and beverages to great artists.

I got instructions to take flight to Tampa or Sarasota airport since Orange had arranged transfer from there to the resort. When I arrived on sunday I realized that the distance from Tampa is much more that I expected and that I can't anyhow handle my scheduled return flight. I didn't want to pay any extra fees to change the ticket so I didn't have another option than take a ride in my collaques car from Sarasota to Miami.

I shared the flat with Mr. Easa Thaeri from Bibcom The name BibCom stands for Big Brother Communications. Easa has developed nice survillance application for babies, dogs etc. The idea is that user installs one application to secondary Symbian terminal and he can anytime open a session with another Symbian terminal and check how is everything in house.
The terminals are authenticated by using PIN code so there is no risk that just anyone can call to your Bib-application and see what's happening. The system works smoothly over 3g connection.

The idea of Partner Camp is to find new developers for mobile applications and give guidelines for them how to work with Orange. And that is something it really was, there was lot's of sessions about importancy of brand, quality and testing. which are the corner-stones of any succesful business.

There was also very interesting sessions from Symbian, Forum Nokia and UIQ . Each of them was promoting their own platforms and giving small work-shops.
Palm was also present but mainly in exhibition mode so they didn't have any sessions.
The new version of Palm is going to run on Linux so it's interesting platform for open-source developers, let's see if there will be similar boom in futuree with Palm as now is with Nokias internet tablet 770.

For me and the company I'm representing the Partner Camp provided some interesting contacts in content development sector, but the Symbian sessions were also very usefull since seems that we are getting more and more involved to the mobile application development as well.

Nice to see that some operators has realized that the content providers are important part of their business. I have several experiences where seems that the content providers status is just deliver the content and wait bad reports and late payments in time when operator is making big money...

I will post some images soon to my flickr account. So if You are interested to see how the Partner Camp looks like check the site often ;)